If you're a teen, you CANNOT do "independent research"

If you're a teen, you CANNOT do "independent research". You're 15, 16. You're not a scientist. You don't know how to do research. Why do you think you know how to do research? If you're an undergrad, if you were 20, 22, guess what? You still don't know how to do research. You have a bachelor's degree. You still needed a mentor. Guess what? You're 23. You have a master's degree. You still don't know how to do research. That's why you go for a PhD. So if all of those people at all those levels still need a mentor, what on earth makes you think that you can do the research independently? You can't. But what you can do independently, and this is what these kids do, is write something called typically like a literature review or meta-analysis, which is a glorified summary of other research papers. And here's where they are very arrogant and they get confused. Because when a PhD, a professional researcher in the field does a literature review, that is an expert overview of existing literature where they offer their opinion on top of the science and they're trying to make a lot of different results make sense in context. Which is a valuable thing for the field. It's still not original research. People acknowledge that, but it's a valuable element of scientific research. When a high school kid offers their half-baked opinion after reading 20 research papers, this is a complete waste of our time. There are these high schools that tout themselves for having research programs. And the research program is literally teaching kids how to do these garbage meta-analysis, right? And like they're not really doing research. They're not bothering to get mentors, they're not learning anything. And they're wasting everyone's time, but they're blowing these kids with heads full of hot air and smoke or whatever. And they make them think that they did so much. But the reason I say this is because eventually when you apply to college, you'll submit that research supplement and your actual paper, whatever you wrote, is going to go into the college and it's going to go to an actual professor who's a real scientist. And they're going to take one look at this and say, this is a meta-analysis written by a high school kid. Bye. I know this because I worked in physics research for seven years.